The State Department apparently tried to hide the British security contractor responsible for protection at the U.S. mission in Benghazi. The federal government’s contract database shows two contracts for security guards, funded by the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, findable by searching for “Benghazi.” But, as first pointed out by Breitbart News, and confirmed by LPAC, the Blue Mountain Group was not identified as the vendor in that summary of the contract, but instead, is listed as “Miscellaneous Foreign Awardee.” The vendor contact address and phone number is not the office of Blue Mountain Group, but is for a General Services Administration office in Washington, D.C.

Blue Mountain is not necessarily an enterprise the State Department’s spokesmen would want to brag about — at least until they were forced to admit the existence of the contract on Tuesday. As we reported, Blue Mountain is joined at the hip with the British SAS special forces outfit. Its personnel overlap with other British intelligence/security groups that LPAC and EIR have profiled for many years, including Control Risks and Executive Outcomes.

Blue Mountain was among the first such groups which moved into Libya following the overthrow and murder of Muammar Qaddafi last year. A UPI story entitled “Security firms hustle in lawless Libya” was published on Dec. 9, 2011, and it began: “As rival militias in postwar Libya wage turf wars in Tripoli and the interim government struggles to form a national army, Western mercenaries are moving in to fill the security vacuum in the oil-rich North African state.”

“Leading the pack is Britain’s Blue Mountain Group,” UPI said, noting that it had been operating in Libya for several months already, and that it had received a “no-objection” certificate from Libyan authorities. No U.S. security/mercenary firms were listed as operating in Libya at the time, but there were at least three other British firms, including Control Risks, plus the Canadian Garda group, and the French Gallice Security firm.